Tag: community project

Today I was The Spellwright for the Hay Meadow Festival in a cool and beautiful field below The Stiperstones in Shropshire. Whenever I looked up I saw people scything meadow grasses, tossing haybales over a high bar with a pitchfork, making flowers, drinking beer, listening to a spot of jazz and swing. All very lovely.

Worth clicking on this one…

Meantime, I wrote spell after spell, for people of all ages, requesting everything from help to catch a Shetland pony to spells for invisibility, for wings, for a tree house, for Silliness… Here’s a small selection.

I’m just starting work on a fascinating project focused on Earl’s Hill above Pontesford, just south of Shrewsbury. It’s called Impressions of the Past – a community arts project celebrating the Iron Age landscape. A week ago I joined Joe Penfold from Stiperstones & Corndon Hill Country Landscape Partnership Scheme, Hugh Hannaford, Senior Archaeological Advisor at Shropshire Council, and a big group of interested people – and up we went.

Here’s a flavour of the place, and the writing that arose from being there. The words are those I collected from participants on the walk, as well as my own.

now we walk in a gaol of ash, its vertical bars/ for here is the cold side of the hill/ this bright world flickers in thin strips

sky is slate & bright/ at once, rain cold

we stand in cold on the swelling edge/ of ramparts that denote/ their status in their number

look up & understand/ the hillforts planted in the sky god’s path/ his race across heaven/ whirled rays of stone/ & bronze/ his little votive wheels

we climb to learn an architecture/ that unmanned/ that put the shield arm/ wrong-sided to the rampart, raised the eyes

Here they used no coin, but cattle, metal/ & a life in the sky god’s upturned hand

The whole poem is below:

Earl’s Hill Translated

begins on a low green mound edged round with oakswhere recent schemes of replica roundhousemotte & baileygreen burial sitewere all seen off by local buyout, how this hillstill matters in the town

& we take in sheets of imageshow LIDAR maps the earth, what’s on ittrees & soil & housesin one hit to every half a metretranslates tocoloured imagesof time & shadow, bouncesoff tree canopies& then subtracts them –makes ground digital

we stand in cold on the swelling edge of ramparts that denotetheir status in their numberlook up & understand the hillforts planted in the sky god’s path his race across heaven whirled rays of stone & bronze his little votive wheels

sky is slate & bright at once, rain cold

we pass from hand to handa stone that’s more deliberate than accidentalhold it in your palm & runyour finger down its cutting edge –a tool

we’re glad to move, get warm along the Bulldozer Path, just oneof the names not on the map but passed by mouthshe says she’s been here nine full years but has a lot to learn

he says he’s been up the hill a thousandtimes & once years backwhen deer were few, a roe buck sprang along the slope – a scout he says & once he found a slow worm on the path

now we walk in a gaol of ash, its vertical bars for here is the cold side of the hillthe way to The Craft & allthis bright world flickers in thin strips

to where the path turns steeply upwhere a Shropshire word again not on the map is valley under rampartwe crick our necks to see where once a palisade joined sky & groundstark against Eastridge & Lordshill

we climb to learn an architecturethat unmanned, that put the shield armwrong-sided to the rampart, raised the eyes& struck reluctant awe

Here they used no coin, but cattle, metal& a life in the sky god’s upturned hand

& we speak of Lily Chitty, local, polymath, archaeologist & botanist, who walked this track& wrote her thoughts down in the thirties

then save our breath & placeour boots in giant’s footstepsas the children dowe’re nearly there, this is the top of the worldnothing can stop us

(how every child in Shropshire’s been liftedonto the white trigto be photographed)

& wind bites us in a howl out of the westsun thins, a rainbow isa strip of brilliance against this stony sky& bracken browns & crispsdies backfrom a fire of toadstools

maps rattle between several handswind cuts through Gore-Tex, butfrom here the ramparts of The Wrekinrise two-horned& we salute the ditches at Wem, at Nesscliff& Old Oswestry, at Llanymynech& the Breiddenat Beacon Ring & Callow Hill